Cooking with Fire

On our second day in Chiang Mai my sister organised for a Thai cooking lesson. We were picked up from the hotel in a songthaew (or สี่ล้อ / S̄ī̀ l̂x – four wheels). The car did a lap of Chiang Mai picking up other groups are other hotels.

One group got in the back with us. Michael started talking with them and we soon found out they were a family from France, and their father was Greek. They then got on like a house on fire for the rest of the afternoon.

First dish was spring rolls. We all had to cut up carrot very small. Extremely small. We were constantly smaller even without them looking at our cutting boards.

Spring rolls also needed a little bit of egg. This is always an excellent opportunity for the place to record some funny videos to use to promote the place. I volunteered / was voluntold to crack an egg on my head, and I duly complied. The key is to commit, like crossing the road in Chiang Mai, hesitate and you just knock yourself in the head with an egg.

When the table was done we were taken over to wok where one of us was asked to stir the content until it was cooked. We headed back to the bench and wrapped up a spring roll each and handed then over to the professionals to cook.

Next appetiser was chicken with satay sauce. We made the satay sauce from scratch before dunking out pieces of chicken in it, and cooking them. All of these tasted pretty good.

Mains

We had each chosen two mains. I chose green curry and chicken with cashews. Step one cut something very small. In this case it was the ingredients for the green curry paste. We also go to hit things with a rock. After prepping all the ingredients for both dishes we were unleashed on the woks.

First dish, curry.

Not my green curry.

After the curries we were asked to do our stir fry, but we had to take it turns so they could manage the oil and water for us. This is when it got fun. They asked us to warm up the wok until just as the oil started to smoke. They added the food first before a good table spoon of water into the hot oil to get the flames going.

The camera had a hard time with the contrast in the scene, and I had hard time concentrating on framing the shot while shaking the pan.

My master piecesMichael enjoying his massaman Curry

Before we left they asked us to stick our little name tags on the wall. Rachel thought she found her one from a few years ago. It said Rachel, and was in her hand writing, but we still weren’t 100% sure it was even the same place.